Techniques for cleaning lots of CDs?

I’ve kept most of my CDs and DVDs in uncovered spindles. In retrospect, I should’ve taken better care of them.

I’m not sure why, but most of them look like crap. It’s like there’s CD-eating bacteria flying around my apartment. Do they just flat out degrade upon exposure to air, or what?

Anyway, I have hundreds of them, and I was thinking of cleaning them and storing them better.

What can I do to quickly clean hundreds of CDs? Hand washing each one would be pretty time consuming. Can I soak them in soapy water, and maybe blow dry them, or does soaking them damage them? Any tips?

I should add that I’ve got plenty of burned and regular (stamped?) CDs to deal with.

There are automatic cleaners available in the $20-$30 price range which do a fairly good job, IME. Some of them are automated to the point that you just put a disc in and press a button; the cycle runs and stops automatically. Others require a little more operator attention, but all of them do the job pretty quickly, compared to hand cleaning.

Best way I’ve found is to rinse them under warm water and wipe with a soft towel across the grain. I suppose you could put them in a dishwasher (without the soap) and run it for a couple of minutes, then drip dry, but I haven’t tried it.

What do you mean across the grain? Just across the cd, from one side to the other?

CDs should be cleaned radially, that is, wiping from the center outward perpendicularly across the tracks. This minimizes the chance of a scratch wiping out a large section of a track, making it unreadable and overwhelming the built-in error correction. The automatic cleaners do this, well, automatically.

Yeah, that.

By the way, most people think it’s the data side which should be treated as delicately as possible, but it’s actually the label side which is most prone to damage. The actual foil medium which is imprinted with the data is under a very thin layer of polycarbonate right under the label, and is very easily damaged. Damage here almost invariable penetrates the foil resulting in a hole which is unrepairable; enough holes render the CD unreadable. Scratches on the data side can cause problematic reading, but if not too bad can be repaired by various means.

The vid store I work at has a DVD buffer. It cost about $3,000. It looks kind of like a PC tower, only instead of boards and chips for guts it has an adapted jeweller’s polishing wheel with three grades of abrasives. It takes out all but the deepest gouges and restores the disc to mint condition. I take my CDs into work to repair them. So, depending on the investment you have in your discs . . .